Ecuador

Just when you thought the whole world was as crowded as Lower Trestles or Sebastian Inlet, along comes Ecuador: miles of wave-lashed coastline hiding between Colombia and Peru that the surf world has overlooked.

Ecuador straddles the equator in the northwest corner of SouthAmerica. Surrounded by Peru to the south and Colombia to the north, the coast of mainland Ecuador covers about five degrees of latitude and extends 700 miles out to the sea, to the Galapagos Islands.

Mainland Ecuador is one of 17 “mega diverse” countries in the world: 1600 bird species, 25,000 species of plants, 106 unique reptiles, 138 endemic amphibians, and 6,000 species of butterfly. But no one has yet added up all the surf spots in the country, because many of them are rarely surfed and barely named.

The Ecuadorian coastline is also mega diverse – along the mainland and out to sea, in the Galapagos. The Ecuadorian mainland plus the Galapagos add up to almost 1400 miles of coastline, and on the mainland, that coastline makes a dramatic transition from tropical rainforest north of the equator, to the bone-dry moonscape of the Atacama Desert south of the equator: Rainfall around Esmereldas in the north is around 98 inches a year (eight feet of rain!), while only a few hundred miles to the south, the coast to the west of Guayaquil gets no rain at all (none!).

The Galapagos Islands are to Ecuador what Hawaii is to the west coast and Puerto Rico is to the east coast. When most outsiders think of the Galapagos they think of a protected National Park that is off-limits to all but scientists, and certainly not open to surfers. But that is not the case, and the Galapagos have become one of the most exotic passport stamps a surfer can collect. And if you suspect that an island chain located directly on the equator, 700 miles out to sea and equidistant from the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific might have surf – well you have suspected correctly.